In research and other analytical fields, a key goal for any project is answering a question or explaining a phenomenon. Whether in basic scientific research or for advertising purposes, workers in these fields attempt to discover and explain cause and effect relationships. For example, a biologist might attempt to explain why a certain compound produces a given effect, a social scientist might attempt to explain why suicide rates drop during holidays, and a marketing professional might try to determine why the latest fad is selling well. As part of the scientific method, researches attempt to come up with a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon or observed result. Prior to this, they perform background research in order to construct a well rounded hypothesis. However, since the process of background research can be time intensive, especially for extremely general or wide ranging phenomenon. Trying to find, review, and evaluate a large number of possible explanations is often unrealistic. There exists a need for a way to expedite and improve this background research stage.
The present invention seeks to address this need through correlation. Correlation can be used to show potential relations between data. Though correlation doesn't imply cause and effect, it can help to quickly identify areas for background research. By focusing background research on data that is at least correlated to the observed effect, a researcher can quickly narrow their field of background research. This allows the researcher to spend less time reading up on data that may end up being completely unrelated, and even lets them focus their efforts on data that has been shown to be strongly correlated to the observed effect. Ultimately, by using correlation a researcher can accelerate the background research stage.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to build a database of files through the use of a web crawler. It is a further object of the present invention to analyze the database to find correlations between stored data files. It is a further object still of the present invention to allow an entity to search for the database for correlated data.